Man Trouble
by MizJoely
Summary: Molly's friend Meena is having man troubles, and Molly herself is a bit annoyed with a certain not-dead Consulting Detective who's been hiding in her flat off and on..post TRF fluffy one-shot.


_Dedicated to wickedwanton on the (belated) occasion of her birthday)_

_Unbeta'd and written in about 10 minutes so apologies if quality is lacking. :)_

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"Men are pigs!"

Molly blinked and turned to face her co-worker and fellow pathologist Meena with a concerned frown. "All men or just one man in particular?" she asked as Meena stomped into the lab and slammed the stack of files she was carrying down on the countertop.

"All men!" Meena declared, flipping her blonde ponytail over her left shoulder as she glared down at the files as if they were the cause of her outburst rather than some man. "Well," she relented after a moment, "just one man. This time."

"Um, anything I can do to help?" Molly ventured when it was clear Meena wasn't going to elaborate without some prompting. "I mean, I can at least agree with you if you want to vent. Or tell you it'll be all right, rubbish like that. Whatever you need," she added as she crossed the room and put a commiserating hand on the other woman's shoulder. "Why don't you tell me about it?"

Meena sighed heavily before plopping onto the nearest stool and spinning it aimlessly as she appeared to consider Molly's offer of moral support. "Yeah, I guess I do," she finally said as Molly pulled up another stool and hopped onto it.

Then she proceeded to stare moodily at her hands for a full minute, long enough for Molly to wonder if she'd changed her mind when she finally started speaking, the words pouring out of her in a half-angry, half-bewildered stream. "See, there's this bloke, the one I've been seeing, you remember him, Bash, we started dating about a month ago and he's been really perfect, I mean _really_ perfect, Molly. You remember him, at the Christmas party?"

Molly nodded. Yes, she remembered Meena's latest boyfriend. She didn't recall him being all that "perfect," especially once he had a few pints under his belt and had cornered Molly in the file room.

She'd temporarily left the party because she'd remembered in a panic that she'd promised Sherlock some information he needed on a few recent autopsies he thought might be connected to Moriarty's criminal network.

Sherlock had been officially dead for six months at that point – it was mid-January now and so he'd been officially dead for another month, bringing the total to seven.

And driving Molly positively spare the entire time, but that had nothing to do with Meena's man troubles. Except that Bash had stumbled into the file room and put the (extremely drunken) moves on Molly and she'd ducked out of his clumsy attempts to chat her up and never told Meena about it. She'd put it down to alcohol, laughed it off when Sherlock quizzed her about it back at her flat (he had a habit of showing up at odd hours of the night and scaring the living daylights out of her and, even more infuriating, overfeeding her cat Toby against her explicit instructions).

Molly gave a slight shake of her head; again, those were her man troubles, not Meena's. Who was rambling on, oblivious of Molly's straying attention, talking about what a great guy Bash was, or at least, how she'd thought he'd been up until today.

When he dumped her.

For no reason.

Molly and Meena had been coworkers and occasional lunch buddies when their shifts coincided for over a year, and in that time Molly had come to realize that when Meena declared that someone had done something to her "for no reason" that the opposite was usually true.

It was just a matter of figuring out if she cared enough to try and dig for the truth.

This time, however, it seemed Meena wasn't exaggerating; there really did seem to be no reason for Bash to dump her.

"I didn't start any fights or ignore him or withhold sex or anything!" she swore when Molly gently pressed her on the subject. "I didn't make him go to girly movies, I let him swear and drink as much as he liked without complaining about it...and just like that!" She snapped her fingers and glared at Molly. "He dumped me. By text."

She thrust her phone into Molly's face, and the other woman took it automatically in order to read the message.

As she did, she felt a chill go over her, then a sharp jab of anticipation.

Not because of the message itself, but because of the way Meena's ex-boyfriend had signed it.

Apparently Bash's full name was Sebastian.

Sebastian Moran.

One of the snipers Sherlock had been looking for for the past six months.

While Meena jumped off her stool and began raging around the lab, Molly surreptitiously forwarded the offending text to her own mobile so she could show it to Sherlock when she returned to her flat. He'd popped back into her life after a month's absence, casually announced his need to "lay low" for a few days, then immediately ignored her questions the way he always had.

Well. For once, Mr. Sherlock Holmes was going to be surprised by Molly Hooper.

She couldn't wait to show him that she'd been the one to find the most elusive member of Moriarty's former network!

That, she thought smugly as she made sympathetic noises and laid Meena's mobile on the counter, would teach that self-centered git to overfeed her cat.


End file.
